I’ve been looking into cults lately and have found that one of the techniques they use to attract their needy and vulnerable members is something called “love bombing”.  This is showering the new recruit with praise and a kind of intense but artificial intimacy.  “I’ve never had friends like this before!  What love I’ve found!” the neophyte thinks, and thus gets sucked in.

This is followed by an isolation from society and a tearing away of the recruit’s personality, a breaking of the spirit and the will, so as to produce a dependent soul, intensely attached to the Leader and willing to follow him anywhere – especially into the sack.

Back in the days when I studied under my old acting guru, I experienced just this kind of game.  He would lead the actors in whacko group therapy type sessions where he would arrange it so that at least someone in the group broke down in tears at every rehearsal.  He would orchestrate a kind of love bombing of members, to be balanced by ostracism to control a member’s recalcitrance or independence of thought or will.  Actors who were more independent or who didn’t drink the kool-aide were in one way or another removed from the company.  And the slavish idolatry he elicited from the young women and teenaged girls was a sight to behold.  There were certainly enough indications at the time, and looking back it appears certain, that he was sexually abusing his female followers, including the underage ones.

Why did I work with such a man?  I was a teen myself, and his method of acting seemed to be a panacea – it was a way of integrating my personality, of producing powerful and almost religious reactions within me, it was a kind of church of the enlightened, an esoteric group of talented and emotional people who seemed intensely intimate with one another – but all of it was contrived.

All of it was a short cut.  False intimacy.  Faux religion.  And not even good acting, much of the time.

Why do I bring this up now, thirty or more years after my “deprogramming”?  Because it’s very tempting for us to want this in our Church, and thereby to want to wash away all the mundane struggles, the fallible parishioners, the less than zealous preaching, to focus on the miserable grocer beside us in the pews, as C. S. Lewis would say, instead of on God.  But it’s hard to focus on God in the real world!  Things are so … ordinary!

And yet it is among such ordinary people that common sense and sanity reigns, and it is into such a fallen and dreary world that Our Lord came, and still comes, even at the most appalling of Masses.

His incarnation into such a world – this is the real Love Bomb!